Loomnie

There are three reasons why the book is so compelling, and the quality of translation will be vital if this success is to continue in other languages. In the precision with which Mr Cole chooses words or phrases he is not unlike Gustave Flaubert, who sometimes took a week to write a single paragraph. Thus New York’s horses are “blindered”, its flocks of birds “take auspices” as birds did in Roman times, the traffic on Sixth Avenue “with its rush-hour gladiators testing each other’s limits” are a stark contrast to the quietude of the American Folk Art Museum where Julius first encounters Brewster’s portraits.

Secondly, like the Ethiopian-born writer, Dinaw Mengestu, another African who has become American (and also a rising star), Mr Cole has no time for clichés and generalisations. Julius rails against a film director who thinks that French-speaking Mali and Anglophone Kenya are interchangeable. This is not pedantry, but a quiet insistence that Africans can no longer be lumped together as one. When Julius flies to Europe, it is not to his mother’s homeland, Germany, but to Belgium, a nation with a long and complex history involving Africa. By the time readers follow Julius to Lagos, they no longer see Nigerians as nationally feckless, but as sympathetic, complicated individuals.

Last, and most important, given how contemporary novelists are criticised for repeating the achievements of those gone by rather than adequately portraying the modern world, is that Mr Cole is an original. James Wood, a British critic who teaches at Harvard, is one of a number of reviewers who have singled out Mr Cole’s work. “Open City”, he says, is as close to a diary as a novel can get, an unusual accomplishment for which “a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake.” It could so easily have failed. Instead, it is a clear-eyed and mysterious achievement, a modern meditation that is both complex and utterly simple.

The whole review is here.

I agree with the three points. The language of the book is very well thought through. One gets the feeling that only the writer could have written the prose, and that every expression is carefully considered before it is chosen. The other contemporary Nigerian writer whose prose is that personalised is Helon Habila – see his Oil on Water.

My other thought ties in with the last point in the review. With this book, Teju Cole has consolidated what he showed that he could do in his earlier work, the novela Every Day is for the Thief (sadly, the Nigeria-published book is not available on Amazon or anywhere online for that matter). In the book, he showed what could be done with a diary-like style of writing. The style shows itself in the much more mature Open City.

Get the book if you can. And I’ve just ordered Dinaw Mengestu’s How to Read the Air.

Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times:

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.

The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.

Here

That is the title of a new book by Gareth Dale. If you are interested in economic history and the history of ideas you should check out the book. Or at least this review.

The book is acclaimed as the first comprehensive book on the ideas and legacy of Karl Polanyi. If you have ever heard of The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi wrote the book.

HT to Tyler Cowen.

Helon Habila is a Nigerian novelist and poet. His first novel Waiting for an Angel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best First Book, Africa Region) in 2003.

His three choices for Nigeria are;

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

2. The Man Died by Wole Soyinka

3. The Famished Road by Ben Okri

From the BBC Worldservice (with audio). Why can’t one embed BBC media anymore?

I can’t quarell with the list and his reasons for choosing them. I remember the pleasures of reading the first two on the list, and the struggles of reading the third.

Habila himself is one of the better contemporary Nigerian writers. See this review of his new book, Oil on Water.

Farafina Trust will be holding a creative writing workshop in Lagos, organized by award-winning writer and creative director of Farafina Trust, Chimamanda Adichie, from May 20 to May 29 2010. The workshop is sponsored by Nigerian Breweries Plc. Guest writers who will co-teach the workshop alongside Adichie are the Caine Prize Winning Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, Chika Unigwe winner of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for creative writing, South African writer Niq Mhlongo and celebrated Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo.

The workshop will take the form of a class. Participants will be assigned a wide range of reading exercises, as well as daily writing exercises. The aim of the workshop is to improve the craft of Nigerian writers and to encourage published and unpublished writers by bringing different perspectives to the art of storytelling. Participation is limited only to those who apply and are accepted.

To apply, send an e-mail to Udonandu2010@gmail.com

Your e-mail subject should read ‘Workshop Application.’

The body of the e-mail should contain the following:
1. Your Name
2. Your address
3. A few sentences about yourself
4. A writing sample of between 200 and 800 words. The sample must be either fiction or non-fiction.

All material must be pasted or written in the body of the e-mail. Please Do NOT include any attachments in your e-mail. Applications with attachments will be automatically disqualified. Deadline for submissions is April 22 2010. Only those accepted to the workshop will be notified by May 6 2010. Accommodation in Lagos will be provided for all accepted applicants who are able to attend for the ten-day duration of the workshop. A literary evening of readings, open to the public, will be held at the end of the workshop.

In a beautifully written piece over at the New York Review of Books blog, Tony Judt discusses what identity means in a cosmopolitan world. H/T Aleksandra Gadzala

For a further discussion/problematisation of the concept see ‘Beyond “Identity”‘, by Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper. Ungated pdf version available here.

The Berlin International Film Festival was a product of the Cold War. The US military administration wanted to bring a touch of glamour to a West Berlin that had survived the Soviet blockade. Since then, the festival has gained a reputation for championing political, provocative movies, and has been no stranger to scandal.

The Berlinale is currently on here in Berlin. For a bit of the history of the festival, check this Der Spiegel article.

If you like movies, or if you are in any way interested in them, you should be listening to Mark Kermode‘s film review on BBC 5 live. Kermode wrote a PhD thesis on horror fiction, and his best movie is The Exorcist. The passion with which he rants about movies he hates is matched by the passion with which he praises movies he likes.

His best movie of 2009? Let the right one in.

The weekly podcast is always available a few minutes after the live broacast every Friday. Click here to go to the podcast subscription page, and I promise you will not regret it.

Here is his Kermode Uncut blog.

At the African Studies Centre in Leiden, The Netherlands:

The twelfth edition of Africa in the Picture, with as main theme “Crisis, what crisis?”, will be held from 9 to 14 September 2009 . During the festival, more than 50 films produced in Africa or by directors with African roots will be shown in Amsterdam and six other Dutch cities.

Africa in the Picture’s founder and former director, Mariët Bakker, will give a talk on The African Documentary at a seminar hosted by the African Studies Centre on 3 September 2009 in Leiden. During the talk she will show clips from recent documentaries and from the Africa in the Picture archive.

To coincide with the seminar and the film festival, the Library, Documentation and Information Department of the African Studies Centre has compiled the present web dossier. The dossier is based on the ASC library collection and is a sequel to the dossier on African Cinema compiled in September 2003

Part of the Africa in the Picture film archive is held by the ASC library, which also maintains its own film collection of more than 1000 titles.

The website is here.

H/T SocioLingo Africa.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Afro-Beat Journal (afro-beatjournal.org) is an new online journal, based out of NYU, devoted to the study of Global African artistic and cultural forms. It is an interactive, multimedia journal that will feature works on and the work of musicians, visual artists, painters, poets, and writers.

We invite scholars and practitioners to submit papers for the first issue of Afro-Beat Journal on the theme, “What is Afro-Beat?”… Although we take inspiration from the creative genius of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, our initial query is to open the dialogue between the various musical genres and their performative aspects. We welcome contributions that focus on the mediation of these musics from Afro-pop worldwide to Hip Hop, as disseminated through various media such as radio, TV, cable or other forms of performance including live concerts, festivals, and theatre. We also welcome contributions from musicians, visual artists, writers, and poets that will enhance and expand our initial thematic focus, as well as relevant media content files on their works or in the form of interviews or discussion forums.

All submissions must follow MLA guidelines and are due June 15th, 2009.
Please send all submissions and inquiries to the editors at:
editors@afro-beatjournal.org

Publishers may send books for review to Book Review Editor at:
reviews@afro-beatjournal.org